I wasn't taking up the "moral/immoral" argument here - I was simply arguing that it's a recruiting tool. Either it is ineffective, as you claim, or it is effective, which I infer from the fact that it continues to be funded.
I know, I know - the US military is famous for throwing money away, but in the absence of any released statistics (which I expect we will never see), I feel safe in wagering that more than zero people have been recruited by the game.
One unique aspect of America's Army is that it's funded by the real Army, which is entirely funded by the public. Movies aren't funded like this.
So let's say AA3 is your concept, and you're the producer for the project. What kind of grant are you going to write to get funding for this concept? How are you going to justify the expenditure?
I don't imagine the selling point was about "making a great game." They got the funding because the game was supposed to make something happen; I'm guessing they justified it in terms of recruiting. The money for the project might literally come out of someone's recruiting budget.
So, we can argue about what kind of person gets recruited by a game like this... but what I think is beyond arguing is why the game exists, and the reason the game exists is because someone thought it would have an impact on recruiting.
It is also different from a brochure, in the same way that cigarettes can no longer be sold by Joe Camel. The difference between a picture of cigarettes and a picture of a cool smoking camel (it has been argued) is that Joe Camel appeals to kids, and a picture of cigarettes doesn't.
Maybe cigarettes weren't marketed to kids, and maybe they were, but Joe Camel was outlawed. America's Army 3 has more in common with Joe Camel than with the brochure.
...sortof like the intercomm suggestion, what about using this to extend your sound system? My apartment is wired for two phone lines, so I have four wires in the wall (red/green, black/yellow). Each pair would be sufficient for a single audio channel, right? On this basis, it really wouldn't be difficult to create an adapter for a stereo headphone jack to interface with rj-11. Make several adapters with either male or female audio connectors, and you can easily put speakers in different rooms.
Of course, I won't do any such thing because I'm renting, and although we have no voice land line, we do have DSL.
This event has profoundly saddened me, and I want to extend my deepest condolences to the students and families to survive this tragedy. I fully recognize that this is an opportune moment for waxing philosophical on the pros and cons of gun control, but I will refrain from sharing my personal opinion on the matter. Several years out of college by now, I still remember the intensity of attending an engineering school, and it saddens me that such noble intentions to achieve can become so depraved.
I've read speculation that the shooter was an engineering student, and I guess the most constructive item I can offer is this rambling:
When I was 18, I was certain I understood it all upon graduation from high school. Afterwards, I did some of the stupidest shit I've ever thought of.
When I was 21, I was certain I understood it all upon graduation from college. Still, I did the dumbest, most dangerous stuff in my life, even endangering people I love.
I'm currently 25, and I still have trouble remembering that I don't understand it all. I'll learn this one yet, but family members from two generations ago still look upon me as an infant.
So here it is: I'm ignorant for lack of experience, and unless you're a god, then so are you. If you're so sad that you will take your own life, then your frame is entirely skewed, but ultimately it's your choice to seek help. The right of self-determination will not prevent you from committing suicide, but be advised that unless your hardware is damaged (body failing, brain malfunctioning), then the solution is simply a matter of updating your mental software.
With that said, AT NO POINT DO YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO DETERMINE ANOTHER PERSON'S DESTINY. You are not the force of justice in this world, the taker of souls, or the vigilante crusader. You are not isolated on a genetic island. Following the chain enough generations back, and you find you are directly related to every other human on the planet. In my opinion, you probably shouldn't kill yourself, but YOU MUST NEVER KILL ANOTHER HUMAN (limited exceptions exist).
The VT case is not an exception. It is unacceptable. There is no justice in it. There is no society through murder. To the killer, I will pity you only insofar as your ignorance would prevent you from realizing your ability to control your situation and life. I've already thought that thought about the VT gunman, and it passed in an instant. What remains is a deep feeling of loss - the same emotion I feel for other heinous acts committed by our species against ourselves. My loss, your loss. This challenges my ability to maintain control of my own destiny, and I resent the killer for it - the same resentment I feel towards all killers.
This is pathetic, and I feel so sorry for the people directly affected. If there's anything that can correct the situation, it's playing properly to our astonishing intelligence by eliminating ignorance. I hardly know myself, and I've been consciously working at it for almost a decade. I want to know my "self" and I want to know "you." I want to transcend these pockets of isolated information that, through an incomplete gestalt, lead us to destroy intelligence. I want my consciousness to witness the entire planet, and then the entire universe, and THEN the whole rest of it.
So, to put it all another way, it's time to learn more, because my story is that of unfolding ignorance, where the territory stretches vastly beyond the horizon, and I still don't fully grasp the extent of what there is to be ignorant of.
The entire reason the FCC gets to dominate the electromagnetic spectrum is couched in the belief that it is for the public good that broadcast TV exists. Broadcast TV is strongly integrated with the national warning system, for example, and provides other allegedly important public services.
No more broadcast, no more FCC domination of all those wavelengths. And yet, I think the public is at least minimally served by broadcast, and that the media companies are pretty keen on keeping their monopoly of the broadcast spectrum.
This strikes me as being very cool for a number of reasons. The prototype is tiny (neato). picture Look at the specs closely, however. specs Unless I'm reading it wrong, they claim that the motherboard with serial, both network ports, and video running draws under 2.5 W. That's amazing. Also, it appears to be passively cooled. This is a great set of features for always-on applications.
Graham mentions the tribal nature of CS, suggesting that if you pay attention to the people around you, you might catch a glimpse of the fashionable tools and questions those "tribes" ponder. Then, effectively in the same breath, he criticizes the so-called soft sciences for the quickly-changing tools they use in their science, which Graham contrasts with the centuries-old establishment of physics.
This is crap. For a philosopher and CS luminary to write off entire branches of science is heresy. Let's never forget: all of the topics he discusses are derived in one way or another from a well-established philosophy: science and the scientific method. It doesn't matter what you study, so long as you apply science to it....and to claim that there is greater value in studying a computer than a human, as a psychologist does, is childish. I am at a loss for words to describe the human brain as anything other than a wildly complex computer. To suggest that psychology is a waste of time because its tools change quickly is as idiotic as saying the same of computers. What is changing is the level of understanding in the field.
What language do you program in, Graham? Better yet, which bastardization of LISP are you trying to have accepted this week?
the 21st century definition of value: relevance
on
TV Piracy is Next
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· Score: 1
There is only one reason for Google to exist: they give you what you ask for. If you search properly, they give you relevant information. They don't throw popup ads in, annoying banner ads, etc. They don't allow advertisers to artifically dope the rankings.
Relevance is the new definition of value. When CDs were full of crap tunes accompanying one radio-quality single, people rejected the CD-based pricing model. They wanted the one single - that was the relevant piece of information. The rest was crap, and you probably wouldn't find people downloading the filler crap on a CD as often as you would find them downloading the singles.
The internet is driven by a relevance model. It's obvious with search engines and less obvious with mp3s, but it clearly still applies. Television is no different. When you watch TV, you want to see the show you're watching. Are commercials relevant? No. Does a better option exist? Yes. Tivo and RSS/Bittorrent both provide more relevant content than broadcast/cable/satellite.
Will the old television model ever be competitive? Yes, assuming they adopt the stance that consumers want relevant content. They are beginning an uphill battle if they want to sell inferior content as a competitive alternative to a superior content delivery mechanism.
The solution?...once upon a time, it cost a lot of money to set up a television station. You had to have capital (this is capitalism) to spend on an infrastructure. Lo and behold: RSS/bittorrent facilitates the infrastructure by asking the viewers themselves to provide the bandwidth. If I were a TV exec who came up with the idea of offloading the infrastructure costs to the consumers, I'd be an evil overlord genius....so the solution is for a startup, who hasn't invested in the infrastructure, to make some good content, DRM it, and sell it for $1 per download. If it's like 90% of the crap on TV currently, it probably won't go too far. If it's quality content that strikes the consumer as being relevant, it just might stand a chance in a relevance-driven world.
I don't watch the show. However, I have read some of the literature on eyewitness testimony and am convinced that eyewitness testimony can be easily manipulated by the manner in which the lawyer phrases the questions or other, subtler prompts. It doesn't matter how certain the witness is that their memory is accurate.
You're not honestly trying to sell the idea that someone without knowledge is as capable as someone with knowledge, are you?
Buried somwehere within the Library of Alexandria were clues that could have advanced civilization dramatically had they come to light, rather than being burned to the ground. Inasmuch as calculus is important, had Archimedes' treatment of his "method of exhaustion" been better known, Newton and Leibniz would have been pretty irrelevant, as they arrived at similar conclusions millenia later. Archimedes' "mechanical method," as it is also known, was re-discovered in the 1900s, but its very presence in a library of ancient times could have made us humans far more than we are today.
The ways we affect our own body processes through drugs or, even more fantastically, gene therapy, are simply the by-product of information being passed down. Note that this is information that fundamentally modifies the functioning of the human, whatever the state of the human species is at that moment. Is it the information iself that leads to transhumanity, or is it the execution of that information?...until a point, the distinction holds some significance, but information is execution at a certain scale of observation.
Sweet, glorious crap! I must echo the sentiments of those supporting 2001 for being far greater than 'sucking'.
I'll admit that the first time I watched it, I thought it sucked, too. It was slow and non sequitur. However, I realize now that the moments where the movie progresses slowly only emphasize the immense speed with which intelligence exponentially increases. Consider how the final moments of the movie seemingly span decades, culminating in the creation of an intelligence far beyond what had previously existed.
2001 is a movie about intelligence, transhumanism, and the singularity, all of which are amazingly timely. 2001, as a movie, is not merely an artistic statement, though it is among the most finely crafted movies of the century.
Star wars, for all of its fantastic, visual action, wears its short-sightedness on its forehead. Honestly, which is more plausible: attaining faster-than-light travel or hacking our own bodies and amassing intelligence at an exponential rate, building towards some sort of creature we don't yet have any conception of?
I'll answer that: the latter is the case, and is, in fact, currently the case. It's not a thing waiting just around the corner. Slashdot is the star-child of 2001. People wandering around the planet, plugged in to the network 24/7, are far, far smarter than humans who aren't plugged in.
Literally. Ask a person with a cellphone any question at all. As long as the answer is a factoid and that person posesses moderate searching skills, it doesn't matter if the answer is cached in their cortex, because a slightly higher latency but infinitely larger storage medium is a few thumb-presses away.
If that person is able to answer questions that a non-connected person is unable to answer, there is clearly an information differential between the two. One human is more human, and the other, transhuman.
Humans happen to be little more than information processors riding the crest of the real-time-ness wave, and lowering latencies of access to various forms of information are basically the only thing preventing an entity of unlimited intelligence from processing in real-time.
Perhaps these notions were well understood at the time of the making of 2001, but I suspect not, as these concepts are as yet not well understood. All the more reason that the movie should be regarded as visionary beyond imagination; the movie itself is more than the images portrayed on the screen. The imagination behind the images is communicated lucidly, taking only a very limited number of artistic liberties along the way.
The portion of 2001 regarded as artistic are more appropriately majestic, and the rest, that which we consider sci-fi, are analogous to a higher being channeling symbols through a prophet. Does it possess additional significance when the fiction portion of sci-fi is more readily compared to poetry, religion, and logic?...when the fiction becomes pure science?
Come on - the RIAA can't make electronic distribution of music profitable but cellphone companies can?...and by virtue of that, the particular mathematical transformation that re-encodes the sequences of acoustic impulses necessary to modulate the cellphone speaker to produce a familiar noise must be challenged in court? It's okay to use some speakers but not others?
These companies have a horrible time keeping their business models up to date... and inter-industrial consistency in argument seems to be failing.
I know, i know... not too soon. Nor should Mozilla worry about the hardware side of things... So let's just say you boot linux and "use Mozilla as your shell", whatever that means.
But imagine the consequences of a beautiful, persistent, PDA platform-independent "netGUI" that was extensible and modular... Sounds like Microsoft may soon perceive its toes to be stepped upon again. The next showdown? Mozilla vs WinCE.
Is Mozilla becoming a reasonable platform for PDA application development? Sounds like that...
So I've installed XP several times over (on the one machine I own that doesn't run linux) because of an inexplicable error whereby the machine refuses to spin down the drives before "going to sleep". Not surprisingly, NT's system hive files are the last thing to be written to disk before shutting down, meaning upon reboot, the machine is unusable due to a corrupted hive file and must be booted off another partition.
I decided that this was a nuisance and called tech support one day. The ultimate solution? Honestly, the guy suggested that I just buy a new computer, as he was confident the bug would take years to fix. Years??? I trivially found the issue online - it's been around since win2k, and there are many computer configurations that have reported the same issue.
The content of the article aside, its "smart" format is appealing on several levels.
Among other things, it is a format that is immediately usable. That isn't to say that internet-magazine articles are generally difficult to read, but some are easier than others due to advertising, having the article split into several pages, etc.
Also, this article is a more permanent statement: it can be referred to in the future, all at once, easily. There really is no reference value to most internet-magazine articles - they are so cumbersome and ephemeral that they quickly become part of the "forgotten internet."
The archival policy of the hosting site aside, this article could, by virtue of the atomiticity of the information, have greater staying power than a traditional, graphically infused pop-article. It can be transferred to other locations trivially, and its potential use in more traditional contexts figures in favorably.
Whether or not the content is of value is, again, a different question entirely.
Part of the idea is that there shouldn't be consequences for requesting public information. Either the definition of "freedom" has changed or it is simply not true that the same "freedom of information" exists today as did a few years ago.
It doesn't matter which side of the argument you support; this much can be agreed upon: public information is less free now than it was.
When I got to school last year, the same problem awaited me. I tried working around it by getting codewarrior for linux but I didn't feel it was superior to KDevelop (the environment I use even now). So, in the end, I wrote everything in KDevelop and simply compiled on a friend's machine. In short, I didn't even ask and there were no problems about it.
Granted, the brown office server source code could be modified to make all of the files on your computer publically accessable but the "bug" can be potentially useful as well. Well, obviously, it can be a free webserver and ftp server while taking up little more space than netscape itself. I wonder how many other bloatware applications can be exploited to do productive things? Or, how many other uses are there for Netscape? How many different language interpreters does it have? Java, Javascript, HTML, soon XML... Add to that its ability to use plugins, its ability to generate user intefaces on the fly, its internet connectivity, and you have a very rich set of resources to hack into other applications.
Still, this is a bug and it can be exploited...
This kind of merger is interesting. By joining forces, these two companies will break down some of the barriers that might prevent advances in communications from reaching the consumer. That is, by removing competition, they can bring us better services. However, that's a gigantic catch-22 because by removing competition, they are also making the exploitation of consumers much easier. It's mergers like this that leave me wondering whether or not this is actually a good thing.
I am pretty sure that article is to be taken with a grain of salt.:) Nevertheless, it is entertaining and I suppose there is a shred of historical value to it as well. I wonder why it is that most people involved with technology have such a similar sense of humor.
It's not as if these are the first companies to advertise like this. However, it is encouraging that the FTC is going after some but this is hardly scratching the surface. Granted, we aren't dealing with robbery here so I doubt this is an urgent matter for the FTC but I wish they would step in on more issues surrounding technology. For example, it should be a crime for Microsoft to continue releasing operating systems that still do not operate. (that sounds like false advertising to me!):) PS - sorry for the predictable microsoft rant
Wow! What a brilliant idea! I would have never thought that California University of PA students would know more about computers than CMU students! I was wrong!...wait... That's exactly what was being done. If you'd read any of the 500 other posts, you'd see the problems surrounding the CMU students' use of guessable passwords (such as 'mp3'). To say that it's secure when everyone uses the same password is pretty funny. Don't give yourself too much credit. If it has to do with security, chances are decent that CMU invented it.
That's not true. The RIAA did know about several computers on the CMU network that had web pages and FTP sites because they were accessable through the internet. The RIAA also sent two letters to CMU on October 13th, notifying them about two computers on the CMU network that they had found out about. No, the RIAA didn't tell them to check the intranet for illegal things. However, because the RIAA finds about 5-10 CMU computers a year with MP3s on them, the folks at CMU Computing Services decided to check the network to see how large a problem it really was. Summary: - The RIAA sent letters with specific purposes - The RIAA did not scare CMU into searching the network - CMU searched for their own info. - Some people on the network did make mp3s available to the whole internet
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't taking up the "moral/immoral" argument here - I was simply arguing that it's a recruiting tool. Either it is ineffective, as you claim, or it is effective, which I infer from the fact that it continues to be funded.
I know, I know - the US military is famous for throwing money away, but in the absence of any released statistics (which I expect we will never see), I feel safe in wagering that more than zero people have been recruited by the game.
One unique aspect of America's Army is that it's funded by the real Army, which is entirely funded by the public. Movies aren't funded like this.
So let's say AA3 is your concept, and you're the producer for the project. What kind of grant are you going to write to get funding for this concept? How are you going to justify the expenditure?
I don't imagine the selling point was about "making a great game." They got the funding because the game was supposed to make something happen; I'm guessing they justified it in terms of recruiting. The money for the project might literally come out of someone's recruiting budget.
So, we can argue about what kind of person gets recruited by a game like this... but what I think is beyond arguing is why the game exists, and the reason the game exists is because someone thought it would have an impact on recruiting.
It is also different from a brochure, in the same way that cigarettes can no longer be sold by Joe Camel. The difference between a picture of cigarettes and a picture of a cool smoking camel (it has been argued) is that Joe Camel appeals to kids, and a picture of cigarettes doesn't.
Maybe cigarettes weren't marketed to kids, and maybe they were, but Joe Camel was outlawed. America's Army 3 has more in common with Joe Camel than with the brochure.
...sortof like the intercomm suggestion, what about using this to extend your sound system? My apartment is wired for two phone lines, so I have four wires in the wall (red/green, black/yellow). Each pair would be sufficient for a single audio channel, right? On this basis, it really wouldn't be difficult to create an adapter for a stereo headphone jack to interface with rj-11. Make several adapters with either male or female audio connectors, and you can easily put speakers in different rooms.
Of course, I won't do any such thing because I'm renting, and although we have no voice land line, we do have DSL.
This event has profoundly saddened me, and I want to extend my deepest condolences to the students and families to survive this tragedy. I fully recognize that this is an opportune moment for waxing philosophical on the pros and cons of gun control, but I will refrain from sharing my personal opinion on the matter. Several years out of college by now, I still remember the intensity of attending an engineering school, and it saddens me that such noble intentions to achieve can become so depraved.
I've read speculation that the shooter was an engineering student, and I guess the most constructive item I can offer is this rambling:
When I was 18, I was certain I understood it all upon graduation from high school. Afterwards, I did some of the stupidest shit I've ever thought of.
When I was 21, I was certain I understood it all upon graduation from college. Still, I did the dumbest, most dangerous stuff in my life, even endangering people I love.
I'm currently 25, and I still have trouble remembering that I don't understand it all. I'll learn this one yet, but family members from two generations ago still look upon me as an infant.
So here it is: I'm ignorant for lack of experience, and unless you're a god, then so are you. If you're so sad that you will take your own life, then your frame is entirely skewed, but ultimately it's your choice to seek help. The right of self-determination will not prevent you from committing suicide, but be advised that unless your hardware is damaged (body failing, brain malfunctioning), then the solution is simply a matter of updating your mental software.
With that said, AT NO POINT DO YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO DETERMINE ANOTHER PERSON'S DESTINY. You are not the force of justice in this world, the taker of souls, or the vigilante crusader. You are not isolated on a genetic island. Following the chain enough generations back, and you find you are directly related to every other human on the planet. In my opinion, you probably shouldn't kill yourself, but YOU MUST NEVER KILL ANOTHER HUMAN (limited exceptions exist).
The VT case is not an exception. It is unacceptable. There is no justice in it. There is no society through murder. To the killer, I will pity you only insofar as your ignorance would prevent you from realizing your ability to control your situation and life. I've already thought that thought about the VT gunman, and it passed in an instant. What remains is a deep feeling of loss - the same emotion I feel for other heinous acts committed by our species against ourselves. My loss, your loss. This challenges my ability to maintain control of my own destiny, and I resent the killer for it - the same resentment I feel towards all killers.
This is pathetic, and I feel so sorry for the people directly affected. If there's anything that can correct the situation, it's playing properly to our astonishing intelligence by eliminating ignorance. I hardly know myself, and I've been consciously working at it for almost a decade. I want to know my "self" and I want to know "you." I want to transcend these pockets of isolated information that, through an incomplete gestalt, lead us to destroy intelligence. I want my consciousness to witness the entire planet, and then the entire universe, and THEN the whole rest of it.
So, to put it all another way, it's time to learn more, because my story is that of unfolding ignorance, where the territory stretches vastly beyond the horizon, and I still don't fully grasp the extent of what there is to be ignorant of.
Y?
The entire reason the FCC gets to dominate the electromagnetic spectrum is couched in the belief that it is for the public good that broadcast TV exists. Broadcast TV is strongly integrated with the national warning system, for example, and provides other allegedly important public services.
No more broadcast, no more FCC domination of all those wavelengths. And yet, I think the public is at least minimally served by broadcast, and that the media companies are pretty keen on keeping their monopoly of the broadcast spectrum.
This article is just flamebait.
uh, er, I linked to the wrong set of specs. TFA says 20 watts... that's still not too bad, really.
This strikes me as being very cool for a number of reasons. The prototype is tiny (neato). picture Look at the specs closely, however. specs Unless I'm reading it wrong, they claim that the motherboard with serial, both network ports, and video running draws under 2.5 W. That's amazing. Also, it appears to be passively cooled. This is a great set of features for always-on applications.
Graham mentions the tribal nature of CS, suggesting that if you pay attention to the people around you, you might catch a glimpse of the fashionable tools and questions those "tribes" ponder. Then, effectively in the same breath, he criticizes the so-called soft sciences for the quickly-changing tools they use in their science, which Graham contrasts with the centuries-old establishment of physics.
...and to claim that there is greater value in studying a computer than a human, as a psychologist does, is childish. I am at a loss for words to describe the human brain as anything other than a wildly complex computer. To suggest that psychology is a waste of time because its tools change quickly is as idiotic as saying the same of computers. What is changing is the level of understanding in the field.
This is crap. For a philosopher and CS luminary to write off entire branches of science is heresy. Let's never forget: all of the topics he discusses are derived in one way or another from a well-established philosophy: science and the scientific method. It doesn't matter what you study, so long as you apply science to it.
What language do you program in, Graham? Better yet, which bastardization of LISP are you trying to have accepted this week?
There is only one reason for Google to exist: they give you what you ask for. If you search properly, they give you relevant information. They don't throw popup ads in, annoying banner ads, etc. They don't allow advertisers to artifically dope the rankings.
...once upon a time, it cost a lot of money to set up a television station. You had to have capital (this is capitalism) to spend on an infrastructure. Lo and behold: RSS/bittorrent facilitates the infrastructure by asking the viewers themselves to provide the bandwidth. If I were a TV exec who came up with the idea of offloading the infrastructure costs to the consumers, I'd be an evil overlord genius. ...so the solution is for a startup, who hasn't invested in the infrastructure, to make some good content, DRM it, and sell it for $1 per download. If it's like 90% of the crap on TV currently, it probably won't go too far. If it's quality content that strikes the consumer as being relevant, it just might stand a chance in a relevance-driven world.
Relevance is the new definition of value. When CDs were full of crap tunes accompanying one radio-quality single, people rejected the CD-based pricing model. They wanted the one single - that was the relevant piece of information. The rest was crap, and you probably wouldn't find people downloading the filler crap on a CD as often as you would find them downloading the singles.
The internet is driven by a relevance model. It's obvious with search engines and less obvious with mp3s, but it clearly still applies. Television is no different. When you watch TV, you want to see the show you're watching. Are commercials relevant? No. Does a better option exist? Yes. Tivo and RSS/Bittorrent both provide more relevant content than broadcast/cable/satellite.
Will the old television model ever be competitive? Yes, assuming they adopt the stance that consumers want relevant content. They are beginning an uphill battle if they want to sell inferior content as a competitive alternative to a superior content delivery mechanism.
The solution?
I don't watch the show. However, I have read some of the literature on eyewitness testimony and am convinced that eyewitness testimony can be easily manipulated by the manner in which the lawyer phrases the questions or other, subtler prompts. It doesn't matter how certain the witness is that their memory is accurate.
The biggest name in this niche is Elizabeth Loftus, who has written at least one book on the topic: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LOFEYE.html
If a show like this can help to chance the public perception of the value of eyewitness testimony, so much the better.
You're not honestly trying to sell the idea that someone without knowledge is as capable as someone with knowledge, are you?
...until a point, the distinction holds some significance, but information is execution at a certain scale of observation.
Buried somwehere within the Library of Alexandria were clues that could have advanced civilization dramatically had they come to light, rather than being burned to the ground. Inasmuch as calculus is important, had Archimedes' treatment of his "method of exhaustion" been better known, Newton and Leibniz would have been pretty irrelevant, as they arrived at similar conclusions millenia later. Archimedes' "mechanical method," as it is also known, was re-discovered in the 1900s, but its very presence in a library of ancient times could have made us humans far more than we are today.
The ways we affect our own body processes through drugs or, even more fantastically, gene therapy, are simply the by-product of information being passed down. Note that this is information that fundamentally modifies the functioning of the human, whatever the state of the human species is at that moment. Is it the information iself that leads to transhumanity, or is it the execution of that information?
Sweet, glorious crap! I must echo the sentiments of those supporting 2001 for being far greater than 'sucking'.
...when the fiction becomes pure science?
I'll admit that the first time I watched it, I thought it sucked, too. It was slow and non sequitur. However, I realize now that the moments where the movie progresses slowly only emphasize the immense speed with which intelligence exponentially increases. Consider how the final moments of the movie seemingly span decades, culminating in the creation of an intelligence far beyond what had previously existed.
2001 is a movie about intelligence, transhumanism, and the singularity, all of which are amazingly timely. 2001, as a movie, is not merely an artistic statement, though it is among the most finely crafted movies of the century.
Star wars, for all of its fantastic, visual action, wears its short-sightedness on its forehead. Honestly, which is more plausible: attaining faster-than-light travel or hacking our own bodies and amassing intelligence at an exponential rate, building towards some sort of creature we don't yet have any conception of?
I'll answer that: the latter is the case, and is, in fact, currently the case. It's not a thing waiting just around the corner. Slashdot is the star-child of 2001. People wandering around the planet, plugged in to the network 24/7, are far, far smarter than humans who aren't plugged in.
Literally. Ask a person with a cellphone any question at all. As long as the answer is a factoid and that person posesses moderate searching skills, it doesn't matter if the answer is cached in their cortex, because a slightly higher latency but infinitely larger storage medium is a few thumb-presses away.
If that person is able to answer questions that a non-connected person is unable to answer, there is clearly an information differential between the two. One human is more human, and the other, transhuman.
Humans happen to be little more than information processors riding the crest of the real-time-ness wave, and lowering latencies of access to various forms of information are basically the only thing preventing an entity of unlimited intelligence from processing in real-time.
Perhaps these notions were well understood at the time of the making of 2001, but I suspect not, as these concepts are as yet not well understood. All the more reason that the movie should be regarded as visionary beyond imagination; the movie itself is more than the images portrayed on the screen. The imagination behind the images is communicated lucidly, taking only a very limited number of artistic liberties along the way.
The portion of 2001 regarded as artistic are more appropriately majestic, and the rest, that which we consider sci-fi, are analogous to a higher being channeling symbols through a prophet. Does it possess additional significance when the fiction portion of sci-fi is more readily compared to poetry, religion, and logic?
Come on - the RIAA can't make electronic distribution of music profitable but cellphone companies can? ...and by virtue of that, the particular mathematical transformation that re-encodes the sequences of acoustic impulses necessary to modulate the cellphone speaker to produce a familiar noise must be challenged in court? It's okay to use some speakers but not others?
These companies have a horrible time keeping their business models up to date... and inter-industrial consistency in argument seems to be failing.
...how soon will PDAs boot directly into Mozilla?
I know, i know... not too soon. Nor should Mozilla worry about the hardware side of things... So let's just say you boot linux and "use Mozilla as your shell", whatever that means.
But imagine the consequences of a beautiful, persistent, PDA platform-independent "netGUI" that was extensible and modular... Sounds like Microsoft may soon perceive its toes to be stepped upon again. The next showdown? Mozilla vs WinCE.
Is Mozilla becoming a reasonable platform for PDA application development? Sounds like that...
So I've installed XP several times over (on the one machine I own that doesn't run linux) because of an inexplicable error whereby the machine refuses to spin down the drives before "going to sleep". Not surprisingly, NT's system hive files are the last thing to be written to disk before shutting down, meaning upon reboot, the machine is unusable due to a corrupted hive file and must be booted off another partition.
I decided that this was a nuisance and called tech support one day. The ultimate solution? Honestly, the guy suggested that I just buy a new computer, as he was confident the bug would take years to fix. Years??? I trivially found the issue online - it's been around since win2k, and there are many computer configurations that have reported the same issue.
Amazing.
The content of the article aside, its "smart" format is appealing on several levels.
Among other things, it is a format that is immediately usable. That isn't to say that internet-magazine articles are generally difficult to read, but some are easier than others due to advertising, having the article split into several pages, etc.
Also, this article is a more permanent statement: it can be referred to in the future, all at once, easily. There really is no reference value to most internet-magazine articles - they are so cumbersome and ephemeral that they quickly become part of the "forgotten internet."
The archival policy of the hosting site aside, this article could, by virtue of the atomiticity of the information, have greater staying power than a traditional, graphically infused pop-article. It can be transferred to other locations trivially, and its potential use in more traditional contexts figures in favorably.
Whether or not the content is of value is, again, a different question entirely.
Part of the idea is that there shouldn't be consequences for requesting public information. Either the definition of "freedom" has changed or it is simply not true that the same "freedom of information" exists today as did a few years ago.
It doesn't matter which side of the argument you support; this much can be agreed upon: public information is less free now than it was.
When I got to school last year, the same problem awaited me. I tried working around it by getting codewarrior for linux but I didn't feel it was superior to KDevelop (the environment I use even now). So, in the end, I wrote everything in KDevelop and simply compiled on a friend's machine. In short, I didn't even ask and there were no problems about it.
Granted, the brown office server source code could be modified to make all of the files on your computer publically accessable but the "bug" can be potentially useful as well. Well, obviously, it can be a free webserver and ftp server while taking up little more space than netscape itself. I wonder how many other bloatware applications can be exploited to do productive things? Or, how many other uses are there for Netscape? How many different language interpreters does it have? Java, Javascript, HTML, soon XML... Add to that its ability to use plugins, its ability to generate user intefaces on the fly, its internet connectivity, and you have a very rich set of resources to hack into other applications. Still, this is a bug and it can be exploited...
This kind of merger is interesting. By joining forces, these two companies will break down some of the barriers that might prevent advances in communications from reaching the consumer. That is, by removing competition, they can bring us better services. However, that's a gigantic catch-22 because by removing competition, they are also making the exploitation of consumers much easier. It's mergers like this that leave me wondering whether or not this is actually a good thing.
I am pretty sure that article is to be taken with a grain of salt. :) Nevertheless, it is entertaining and I suppose there is a shred of historical value to it as well. I wonder why it is that most people involved with technology have such a similar sense of humor.
It's not as if these are the first companies to advertise like this. However, it is encouraging that the FTC is going after some but this is hardly scratching the surface. Granted, we aren't dealing with robbery here so I doubt this is an urgent matter for the FTC but I wish they would step in on more issues surrounding technology. For example, it should be a crime for Microsoft to continue releasing operating systems that still do not operate. (that sounds like false advertising to me!) :) PS - sorry for the predictable microsoft rant
Wow! What a brilliant idea! I would have never thought that California University of PA students would know more about computers than CMU students! I was wrong! ...wait... That's exactly what was being done. If you'd read any of the 500 other posts, you'd see the problems surrounding the CMU students' use of guessable passwords (such as 'mp3'). To say that it's secure when everyone uses the same password is pretty funny. Don't give yourself too much credit. If it has to do with security, chances are decent that CMU invented it.
That's not true. The RIAA did know about several computers on the CMU network that had web pages and FTP sites because they were accessable through the internet. The RIAA also sent two letters to CMU on October 13th, notifying them about two computers on the CMU network that they had found out about. No, the RIAA didn't tell them to check the intranet for illegal things. However, because the RIAA finds about 5-10 CMU computers a year with MP3s on them, the folks at CMU Computing Services decided to check the network to see how large a problem it really was. Summary: - The RIAA sent letters with specific purposes - The RIAA did not scare CMU into searching the network - CMU searched for their own info. - Some people on the network did make mp3s available to the whole internet